2025 Book Club, first quarter!

Whatcha reading?

I just read Grady Hendrix’s new book, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. It was pretty good (I read it in a day), but my favorites are still Horrorstör and How to Sell a Haunted House. Its witchcraft was a little Neo-Pagan-y for me at times, which is both fine and true to the era (1970), and I knew that it would be. Once again, he’s taken a social/political issue (here, maternity homes for unwed teens before Roe) and used horror to explore the history and express the emotions around it. It works really well here.

Before that, I read Woo Woo by Ella Baxter, a short novel about the unravelling of an Australian conceptual artist being stalked in the run-up to a solo gallery show (it features the ghost of famed conceptual artist Carolee Schneemann!). It’s super-weird and hard to explain, and reminded me in that regard of Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva, although, to be clear, they have nothing in common beyond a gonzo commitment to their narrative. It’s also very funny, and I will probably have to read it again eventually to highlight my favorite lines.

Before that, I read The House That Horror Built, by Christina Henry, which was okay. The impetus for the novel felt like it was “what if Guillermo Del Toro moved to my town, and I got to see all his cool stuff, and also Doug Jones is there and we’re friends.” And the plot is to justify those elements (which is not intrinsically a bad thing, I have always maintained that Todd Haynes just wanted to make a movie about David Bowie and Iggy Pop having sex, and grafted on the plot of Eddie and the Cruisers to get it made, and that’s why we have Velvet Goldmine).

Left over from last year:
I am still working on finishing an extremely overdue library copy of Diners, Dudes and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture by Emily J.H. Contois. I’m enjoying it, it has that this is someone’s dissertation vibe for which I am an absolute sucker. It’s mostly about the last 20-25 years, lots of stuff about the changing roles of men during and after the recession, and how marketing changed. I stopped in the middle to read a book from the reference list, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America by John F. Kasson, which I adored. I had no sense of how much of Houdini’s persona and marketing involved his being naked. And I didn’t realize the extent to which Eugen Sandow’s career was being a publicly nude man who everyone enjoyed looking at. It’s charming. And all of the issues with manhood and fitness and technology making men soft and feminine compared to a mythic past are still around, so the book still feels pretty fresh for being 24 years old and about culture approximately 100 years before that.